The upcoming Layers of Fear remake is set to be the first third-party game to use Unreal Engine 5. Epic’s newest game development engine, and its cutting edge features like Lumen and Nanite, drove last year’s lauded graphical overhaul of Fortnite. Now, horror fans will be pleased to hear that Layers of Fear will enjoy these same niceties.
Epic’s Unreal Engine has a long and distinguished history in the game development world. Back in 1998, the studio developed Unreal as a competitor to Quake II and, for the time, it looked fantastic. It wasn’t long before other game developers came calling, wanting to use Unreal Engine for their own games. 25 years, and hundreds (if not thousands) of industry-defining games later, Epic have refined their engine to its fifth iteration.
A headline feature of Unreal Engine 5 is Lumen. According to Epic, Lumen allows for “high-quality ray traced reflections on glossy materials and water” and “real-time global illuminations”. In short, it’s the reason Fortnite, not exactly known in the past for its graphical fidelity, can now look so damn good.
Speaking to WCCFTech, Layers of Fear programmer Krzysztof Kansy waxed lyrical about what it was like making a game in Unreal Engine 5, calling the experience “fast and very enjoyable”.
When asked about the dreaded stuttering issues that plagued recent triple-A releases like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Redfall, Kansy said “[Most] of the stuttering in our game would be caused by Pipeline State Object generation during the gameplay… we are incorporating the PSO Cache system to mitigate this source of issues. It’s a built-in tool that allows us to gather relevant PSO information during development and cook it into the build. We can then generate and cache actual PSO in runtime beforehand instead of generating it during the gameplay.”
Although its status as Unreal Engine 5’s first third-party game should save the Layers of Fear remake from most poor performance issues, there’s nothing that can help the nightmare of your rig not being up to scratch! Don’t be afraid: check out the Layers of Fear system requirements to ensure your PC can handle the horror.